Region's home sales are finally seeing a big boost

Sunday

Jan 29, 2017 at 6:29 PMJan 29, 2017 at 9:23 PM

By James Walsh Times Herald-Record

Single-family home sales are going strong in the mid-Hudson after a decade in the doldrums.

Sales across Orange, Ulster and Sullivan counties jumped dramatically last year, approaching levels last seen before the Great Recession, according to data from the counties' respective boards of Realtors.

In Orange County, sales exploded in 2016, rising 27 percent to 3,479, the highest total since 2005. Sales peaked at 3,860 in 2004, but then dipped as low as 1,593 in 2011 before beginning a steady rise.

The uptick in activity in Sullivan and Ulster has been nearly as dramatic.

“It’s a combination of a lot of things,” said Newburgh Realtor John Lease. “The foreclosures have started coming through … Some of them have been in the process for three years …."

"There are also more lending programs," he said. "And there’s a little more leniency on the lending side. There’s also more consumer confidence, and as interest rates start to rise, more people are pulling the trigger.”

While sales have soared, price increases have been somewhat muted. Competition from foreclosures has dampened prices, as has the slow recovery of higher-priced new construction.

At the same time, new listings haven’t kept pace with sales.

“All of the brokers are struggling for inventory right now,” said Lease, a vice president of the Hudson Gateway Association of Realtors, which serves Orange County. “But it hasn’t affected prices yet. I think that’s because there’s still a good number of foreclosures.”

At Coldwell Banker Village Green Realty in Goshen, Associate Broker MaryBeth O’Hara said she finds the most activity in the $200,000 to $300,000 price range, and that supply is growing tight.

“There’s a big increase in activity,” O’Hara said, “but I haven’t seen the prices moving up.”

Tim Sweeney, president of the Ulster County Multiple Listing Service, said Ulster is also working through a backlog of foreclosures.

Ulster also has a low inventory, but Sweeney expects that to improve in the spring, a traditional time to put houses on the market.

New construction has been spotty, Realtors in Orange and Ulster counties said, focused mostly in the Warwick-Chester-Goshen corridor, for example, along with massive multi-family developments planned in the Kiryas Joel area.

One single-family housing development underway, Heritage at Goshen on Old Chester Road, illustrates a pent-up demand for new housing, as well as a change in buyer tastes.

While 3,000-square-foot houses on multi-acre lots were a mainstay of the 1990s, Heritage at Goshen, being built by Roger Mumford Homes of Red Bank, N.J., features homes of about 1,500 to 2,500 square feet on quarter-acre lots.

Prices start at $329,900 for styles including single-level ranches and colonials.

A popular feature, Roger Mumford said, is a 600-square-foot great room. The room, measuring 20 feet by 30 feet, rivals ones in considerably larger houses, he said.

“We believe that the market was underserved as to what people desire these days,” Mumford said.

The company seems to have read the market correctly. Of the development’s 75 lots, 31 were already under contract to build by the end of the year, even without a model to show.

“If we had on-site inventory, we’d have 50 sales by now,” Mumford said.

Sharon and Ed Purcaro of Monroe are among the buyers. They expect to move into their new 1,685-square-foot home in July.

“We wanted to downsize to a single-level ranch with a manageable yard,” said Ed Purcaro, a retired information technology supervisor for UPS, as he and his wife visited their lot. Earth-moving equipment rumbled nearby. The development sits on a rolling landscape that was largely fields with intermittent woods.

It isn't the first time the Purcaros have been neighborhood pioneers. They also commissioned their Victorian-style home in 1989 in Monroe’s Fairway Estates. That house, Sharon Purcaro said, was the first of about 28 built there.

Jon Shafran of JK Development Corp. said in December that he was building the roads for a new development, Juniper Woods, off Laroe Road in the Town of Chester.

“My goal is to be in with 10 homes by the spring of 2018,” Shafran said.

Sweeney, of the Ulster MLS, was excited about a 43-lot development planned on 92 acres off Route 209 in Marbletown.

Town Supervisor Michael Warren said the preliminary proposal also calls for some commercial development by the highway. He said 75 percent of the land will be preserved as open space.

“New construction always helps the real estate market,” Sweeney said, and he expects more on the way.

There were 161 parcels of vacant land sold in Ulster County as of December 2016, he said, up 75 percent from 2009.

While Renee Zurlo, president of the Hudson Gateway Multiple Listing Service, lamented the low inventory of existing houses for sale in Orange County – 1,906 in late December compared to 2,557 nine years earlier – she saw a bright spot for the residential real estate market.

“What does come in, we’re seeing multiple offers for,” Zurlo said, reminiscent of the heady days of a decade ago.

jwalsh@th-record.com

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